REASON – In a party-line vote [Tuesday] evening, the U.S. Senate confirmed Stanford professor and medical researcher Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The confirmation of Bhattacharya—an early, prominent skeptic of COVID-era lockdowns and mandates—comes at a pivotal time for the NIH and its oversight of risky pandemic research.
There’s been a growing mainstream acceptance that the COVID-19 pandemic did in fact start in a Chinese lab as a result of risky gain-of-function research funded by the NIH.
That’s fanned concerns that a future pandemic could start in a similar fashion should this kind of research not be brought under tighter control.
In the coming weeks, a new Biden administration-crafted regulatory framework intended to strengthen oversight of federal funding for risky pandemic research is scheduled to go into effect.
The White House is also reportedly planning to issue a more sweeping ban on federal funding of gain-of-function research, which Bhattacharya (as head of the agency that funds the vast majority of this research) would be largely responsible for enforcing.
Both the Obama administration and the first Trump administration tried to either pause or place some guardrails around federal funding of gain-of-function research.
Yet both administration’s regulations depended on NIH leadership to flag which experiments they considered dangerous enough to be worth pausing or subjecting to additional scrutiny.
During that time, NIH leadership—namely former Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci—were strong proponents of such research and critics of subjecting its federal funding to additional scrutiny.
In May 2024, the Biden administration issued a new regulatory framework that clarified when research funding agencies like the NIH needed to forward research proposals involving the enhancement of potential pandemic-causing pathogens up the chain for independent department-level risk-benefit review …
